Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Beating Surveillance: Don't Care, Just Laugh

A large orange box on wheels with a video camera on top was chasing random people down Astor Place and up Third Avenue. The box was videotaping the people it pursued. Their reaction? They laughed. Then they watched the box turn on its wheels and chase someone else down the street.

They weren't afraid or annoyed. They seemed almost tickled about having their privacy violated. Why? Maybe because they didn't see it as a serious invasion. Maybe because they were used to surveillance cameras. Maybe because they were nervous. Maybe because attacking a funny-looking box doesn't look good on film. It's like hitting Mickey Mouse.

The operator of the camera-on-a-box, Michael Waters, 33, standing with his remote control device in his hand, spotted an attractive woman approaching in a short skirt. ''Get her, get her!'' he ordered the box. ''Yes!'' She ran away from the box, into the street, and on the opposite corner she collapsed in mock terror. The camera retreated, keeping its lens on her all the while. Mr. Waters admitted he could never get away with this in person. But because it's a silly box with a police light on top, ''no one is rough on it.'' Oh, there are some exceptions. ''One guy punched at it,'' Mr. Waters said. ''But he felt really bad.''

Mr. Waters and his brazen camera seem to be part of a trend: ironic, artistic surveillance. How can you distinguish it from ordinary surveillance? The intention is different. Mock surveillance is intended to be subversive, even comical, and it has no practical purpose. Clearly Mr. Waters was not out to police people with his camera. He was just having fun. Nonetheless, he did plan to show his videotape on public access television, and he wasn't asking anyone for permission.

Surveillance is out of hand. Walk into an apartment lobby and you are on camera. Ride on an elevator and the guards in the lobby watch you adjusting your pants. Get some money from a cash machine and you'll be caught on film counting your bills. Don't try hiding outdoors. Busy intersections are under 24-hour surveillance. There are cameras in public squares. Don't bother destroying them. They'll only catch you on tape doing it.

Maybe the only way to respond to so much surveillance is with more surveillance. You watch me, and I'll watch you watching me. As the artist Julia Sher put it, surveillance art is ''the art that watches back.'' The trouble is, it is hard to distinguish mock surveillance from real surveillance. Ms. Sher admitted that surveillance artists share a bond with the police, since they are both trying ''to find things that are invisible'' and they are both using real surveillance equipment. In other words, surveillance artists may be subversive but they are also part of the grand surveillance machine.

In the late 18th century, the British political philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with what he called ''a simple idea in Architecture,'' a plan for a modern prison called the panopticon (from the Greek word ''panoptes,'' meaning ''all-seeing''). At the center of this circular penal compound would be a tower with windows that could peer into every prisoner's cell. It was to be, in other words, a system of total surveillance. Bentham, who saw it as a painless penal colony, said, ''To be incessantly under the eyes of the inspector is to lose in effect the power to do evil and almost the thought of wanting to do it.''

The philosopher Michel Foucault wasn't exactly won over. He agreed with Bentham that in a system of total surveillance, ''there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze.'' But in echoing Bentham's analysis of the panopticon, he emphasized its sinister aspect. In the end, Foucault said in the 1970's, each individual will internalize this gaze ''to the point that he is his own supervisor . . . exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.'' The presumption of surveillance would make real surveillance unnecessary. Every person would be a prisoner of his own watchfulness.

These days there is so much surveillance, both serious and subversive, that we appear to be living in a panopticon. Take, for a small example, Washington Square. At the south end of the park two surveillance cameras have been installed to help with the policing of the park. Just across the street, outside the Grey Art Gallery, two more surveillance cameras, ironic ones, have been installed by the artist Julia Sher to coincide with the exhibition there, ''Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence.'' The cameras alternate between looking into the park and looking into the museum.

In June, during a symposium on public art and public space sponsored by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, a handful of surveillance artists gathered for a daylong meeting on surveillance, voyeurism and scopophilia (the love of looking). Naturally, the meeting was videotaped. Anyone who wanted to ask a question had to do it on camera and into a microphone.

Anna Novakov, an art historian and the author of ''Veiled Histories: The Body, Place and Public Art,'' argued that modern surveillance, the practice of scoping out city streets to detect crime before it happens, began with men's fear of women. Before the 19th century, she said, city streets were for men alone and women stayed home. It was when the first department stores opened, and women started venturing into the streets, that men started snooping. Fearful of being ensnared by the wrong sort of woman, they wanted to know how to tell the prostitutes from the rest.

At first, Ms. Novakov said, they depended on the flaneur, the man about town who was there to see and be seen, to tell them who was who. But eventually the flaneur's role was usurped by photography. And the art of detecting potential deviants was taken up by physiognomists like Francis Galton. Galton, whose photographs are on view in ''Police Pictures,'' classified people according to facial features and even created composite photographs of criminal faces to ferret out the crucial characteristics.

After the physiognomists, the business of surveillance was taken up by detectives and would-be detectives, Ms. Nabakov said. Wearing miniature cameras in their hats, vests and cravats, they took pictures of people on the street without being noticed.

Now the role that was played by the flaneur, the physiognomist and the detective has been taken by the surveillance camera.

It may seem odd that artists have gotten into the business of surveillance. But many surveillance artists, well-versed in Foucault, have decided that if they are going to be watched, they are darn well going to watch as well. They won't take all this surveillance lying down.

At the symposium, Ms. Sher, the surveillance artist responsible for the two cameras in Washington Square, got up before her audience like someone at an A.A. meeting and said: ''I am an artist, a voyeur and a street person. My mother was a housewife and a voyeur.'' Then she went on to describe her work.

Ms. Sher, who used to install security systems for a living before she became a surveillance artist, has created a series of museum pieces called ''Security by Julia.'' She has set up ''surveillance sex beds'' that videotape people watching pornography while lying down on them. She has set up video monitors in museums to show the faces of passers-by on giant monitors and to caption their pictures.

''We're our own surveyor and surveyed,'' she said, so we might as well be well equipped. Luckily there is plenty of gear now available: battlefield viewing devices, U-2 aircraft data-gathering instruments, face-tracking systems, time-lapse recorders, cameras that strip off your clothes to show what you look like naked and noninvasive devices that look inside your organs to see if you're hiding any drugs. She loves them all.

After Ms. Sher sat down, more surveillance artists came forward. Laura Kurgan, an architect, told how she had made use of the global positioning system to track herself walking along the roof of a museum in Barcelona for a project called ''You Are Here.''

Tony Labat, another surveillance artist, reported that he had just finished shooting a ''Hooters'' video. One camera was trained on some men having a fistfight outside a Hooters restaurant. Another, showing the mats where the stunt men were falling, indicated that the fight was a fake. The third camera was focused on the people inside Hooters who were watching the event through a window.

Have these artists overcome surveillance with surveillance or have they simply expanded the great panopticon? It's hard to tell. But there is one thing that may save us all from being prisoners of our own constant watchfulness: surveillance overload. If everybody is videotaping everybody else, who cares anymore? No one will have time to watch all this stuff anyway. Face it, it's unbearably boring to watch an elevator monitor for more than 10 minutes. In fact, it's not appreciably different from standing on a street corner waiting for something to happen.

For the panopticon to work, for people to be ready to police themselves in a guardless prison, it is not enough for everyone to believe that they are being watched every moment of the day. They must care. It's not the cameras themselves but the fear of the cameras that turns people into what Foucault called ''docile bodies.'' So, if you happen to see a friendly looking orange box on wheels, whatever you do, don't run.